Waking the Dead (51 page)

The vote was taken. The measure was passed, but it didn’t make any difference because it was assured of defeat in the Senate. Above us, in the visitors’ gallery, clumps of school kids were brought in to look down at us over the high railing, like a Sunday school class brought to a fissure in the earth where they could see the souls in Purgatory. It was not yet the time when Congress would be virtually closed to casual visitors, but security was still tight. You did not feel the invitation toward discourse as you walked those institutional green corridors. There were coolers of bubbling bottled water just like in any large office and bored-looking receptionists growing their rubber plants beneath fluorescent light.

In the committee rooms were round wall clocks like in old-fashioned classrooms and built into the faces of each of these clocks was a system of small electric lights—one to signal a quorum call, another to signal that a roll call was about to be taken, and yet another to announce a nuclear war had just begun and that it was time for the legislators to take cover. I didn’t know yet where we were supposed to hide. All I really knew was where my offices were. After Carmichael’s resignation, there had been a scramble for his rather well-placed, well-maintained, and spacious offices and as everyone who wanted a change of quarters had already shifted, the dankest, least convenient space in the Rayburn Building was left for me—a little ghetto up a back staircase, on its own half floor which it shared with the maintenance supervisor and a freshman congressman from Mississippi.

As the vote was taken, I sat with my arms folded over my chest and looked around. I was, on the whole, grateful my family hadn’t listened to me last night and that I hadn’t been taken to some hospital, shot full of tranquilizers, given a pair of paper slippers, humiliated. What I hadn’t understood was that it wouldn’t get much worse: in order to feel any crazier, I would need an entirely new mind to lose. I had topped off at the current level of sorrow and derangement. And if it would not get worse then perhaps, sometime, it would be better. I really had no clear idea anymore why I was sitting in the Capitol, why I had wanted this for so many years, or what exactly I had done to deserve it. But I had to trust that at some time in the past, when I had notched the arrow of my life onto fate’s taut bow, I had known something that in my misery and hunger and utter apprehension I was forgetting now. The only thing to do was hold on—and hope that until I was myself again I could get away with the impersonation. My face would be a mask, my eyes opaque.

I looked up at the visitors’ gallery, telling myself I was just trying to see if Danny and Caroline and my parents were in view. If I had taken this odd, compromising, confusing, and sad journey only to do my part in the greater magic, to sing the notes assigned to me as a part of the spell that would wake the dead, then perhaps she was here at this moment: as aura, as idea, or even as flesh. It suddenly made practically no difference: memory, when it is real, can well take the place of that jumble of conflicting impressions we call the present. Surely I loved her more than, say, Juliet, more, surely, than I could love myself: then in what real sense was she dead? Because she could not love me in return?

When the vote was over, the Speaker announced that the Ninety-sixth Congress would now welcome a new member to its ranks. He made no mention of Congressman Carmichael but instead confined himself to a bit of partisan joshing—professing relief that the new member was a Democrat, that sort of thing. Next thing I knew, Emil Nichols slapped his knees and stood up with a resentful groan and then on the other side of me Buddy Preston was also on his feet, tugging at my sleeve, smiling, saying, Up you go, Pierce. Down the aisle and into the history books. And after that, all the Democratic members of the Illinois delegation were up and we were going down the carpeted aisle toward the Speaker’s chair and I heard the sound of static, as if the nerves in my inner ear were frying out, but then I realized it was applause, they were applauding for me, the entire House of Representatives, not because they liked me or knew anything about what I believed or hoped to accomplish, but because I had made it that far, like a fellow salmon who had made it through the torrents to this breeding ground where we could in relative tranquility spawn more and more two-year terms. I had won. And they were applauding me and, of course, applauding themselves as well, because each of these men and women had beaten someone else out for this job, had made smart deals, said the right thing, known when to hang back and when to pounce, had convinced thousands of strangers that they truly cared about them, had grabbed hold of history’s drag-ass tail and ridden it to Washington, had seen the crack in the door and worked it open until the light poured out and was golden.

And now I was a member of the club, too, and as I made my way toward Speaker O’Neill I saw Sarah’s face among the dozens of faces in the gallery, looking down, and then I looked straight ahead and let myself be taken with the flow toward the podium where I swore to defend the Constitution and was duly admitted to the Congress of the United States of America.

A
FTER THE DAYS
adjournment, the Illinois Democrats had a cocktail party for me in Congressman Germain’s office. He was our senior member and he had the largest, most comfortable offices: the Congress was definitely a place with good and bad neighborhoods—Germain was living on the Gold Coast while I had been given, say, an abandoned loft building to renovate, a dark little place huddling in the shadows of the El. Germain glanced at me from time to time, promising, I thought, to be a friend. I seized upon the possibility because except for him I felt astonishingly distant from my delegation. This was like the first day on the job and feeling the only way you’ll possibly survive is if you keep absolutely secret the truth of your identity—an identity that was, till that moment, a matter of sublime indifference to you but which seemed to have bloomed beneath the alien fluorescent lights into a terrible secret. With the other congressmen were some of their staff, a couple of wives, my family, a small redheaded guy from the Washington Post who wanted to do a story about my first month in the House, a woman from the AP who had done well on the Carmichael story, and a lobbyist from the pharmaceuticals industry who had been talking to Congressman Furillo, a guy from the West Side who called himself Cookie Furillo and who looked like a teen crooner twenty years later playing the oldies-but-goodies circuit. Furillo was a junior member of the Consumer Protection Committee and he was constantly besieged by lobbyists. Furillo was so small-time in his corruption that he actually gave the various and often handsome gifts he accepted to his sister, who sold them to the public in her What-Not Shoppe on West Cicero Avenue. Soon enough, Danny commandeered the pharmaceuticals lobbyist and the two of them retired into a corner, where my clever brother astonished the lobbyist with his encyclopedic knowledge of pills, spansules, powders, solutions, and ampules. “You’ve got to look at it from the point of view of the goddamned
consumer
,” I heard Danny say at one point.

It was the first day of my term and until I decided otherwise I had quite a few people working for me. Carmichael’s Washington staff had remained for the most part intact, keeping as quiet as possible in the hope they wouldn’t be noticed and then fired. Of course, they had been busy—frantic, really—looking for work, sending résumés out to other congressmen, to lobbying groups, law firms, newspapers. But in the meanwhile, they had been collecting their salaries. They ought to have been at this party, but I think they decided that every day out of my sight was another day’s feeding at the federal trough. The only one of them to show up was a tall, stout, boxy-faced, gray-haired woman named Dina Jensen, who had been Carmichael’s secretary for six years and who rightly understood that she was, at least for quite a while, wholly indispensable.

“This has been the worst week of my
life
,” she said, coming to my side, tapping her plastic cup against mine: we were both sticking to the club soda.

“What happened to you?” I asked. She was a tall woman, just about my height, with the solitary, intelligent gray eyes of a nanny in a Victorian children’s book.

“Oh, the
moving
. I despise moving. I’ve been living in the same apartment for eighteen years because I can’t bear the thought of packing everything in boxes. It makes everything seem so impermanent. I don’t know why that frightens me.”

“I do,” I said. “It
is
a total drag.”

“Well, anyhow, all of Jerry’s personal effects have been sent. He couldn’t come for them himself, of course. And
tons
of God knows what have been carted over to your new offices.”

“I hope you’ll continue to work for the district,” I said. “I really do hope you stay on.”

“Well, I may as well,” said Dina Jensen, allowing herself a small smile of relief. “After all that sweat labor.”

The tall windows in Germain’s office went cobalt as the day turned to evening. Isaac and Adele had left with Emil Z. Nichols. Danny, Caroline, and my parents caught the six o’clock shuttle back to New York. I felt unaccountably relieved to see them go. They were from another reality and I needed to cut away.

Caroline was the first to say good-bye to me. She held me by both hands and then looked around to make sure we wouldn’t be overheard. “Are you OK?” she asked. “I know what you’ve been going through.”

“I’m not OK,” I said. “But I’m OK about not being OK.”

“Ha ha?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She looked at me with the peacefulness of family love and then squeezed my hands and kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m going to have dinner with Eric when he and the boys get back,” she whispered into my ear.

“Good,” I whispered back to her. “It’ll help me with the black voters.

She stepped back and smiled and then, abruptly, held me in a fast, hard embrace.

Next, I said good-bye to Danny. He’d been drinking hard, but his eyes were sharp. “Maybe I can come to New York next week,” I said to him, “and we can do something.”

“I’m going to San Francisco,” he said. “I met a guy in Toronto. His family owns all this California real estate. And I’ve got him interested in investing some nice money in Willow Books. That’s the fucking pain of this whole thing. I’m always one hundred thousand short of making a go of it. You know, if I could just push it over the hump, it would be so easy.”

“The guy from Toronto’s in San Francisco?” I asked.

“Yeah. Hey, Fielding. I’m sorry I’ve been shitty to you. I’ve been in a terrible mood. But, you know, the nice thing about long relationships is you’ll have a lot of chances to get even.”

“OK,” I said. “Just make sure I do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Take care of yourself. Don’t let anyone kill you. Not even yourself.”

Danny smiled: it made all the oozy charm of the Illinois delegation seem like the gruntings of whores. Danny with a grin was a boy again; a true smile put him on the banks of the river with his bare feet in the cool blue water.

Finally, I said good-bye to my parents. They looked small and vulnerable in their overcoats and they both looked sleepy and shy, like children who’ve stayed too long at the party. Mom’s hands were icy; Dad was looking at me as if I were suddenly a stranger, worthy of respect.

“Greatest day of my life,” Dad said, with a serious man-to-mannish nod.

“We’re so proud of you, Fielding,” said Mom, glancing over my shoulder into the hidden camera that she imagined recorded the precious moments of her life.

“Just don’t forget who you are,” said Dad, grabbing my hand as if it were something he had to capture.

“As if I ever knew,” I answered, but with a smile so he wouldn’t have to take it seriously.

The party was breaking up. Dina Jensen had delayed her going home to see if I needed anything and I asked her to help me get from Germain’s office to mine. We took an elevator down to the ground floor and then found another bank of elevators and took one of those up to where we would be working for the next year or so. We were going against traffic; all the lawmakers and the office help were waiting for down elevators, on their way home. There were wheelchair-tire skid marks against the gray elevator walls, a scent of cigar smoke. Dina was softly humming to herself. Her features were placid. Her eyes seemed to be looking at nothing. The elevator went to the second floor, the third. Her humming sounded so pleasant; a warmth went through me, slowly, thickly, like honey out of a broken jar.

For some reason, I said her name to myself: Dina. DINA was the acronym of the Chilean secret police, the far-ranging death squad of the junta. It stood for Departamento de Inteligencia Nacional. Its leader was a madman named Contreras and it had probably been he who had called for Francisco and Gisela’s assassination.

I must have begun to stare at Dina Jensen because she slowly turned and looked questioningly at me. Yet what could I tell her? Was she with me for a reason? Even as I stood in that elevator with my heart going cold and going fast and a smell of my own madness up high and back in my nose, like a faraway scent of rain, even then I more or less believed that her name was merely her name and had nothing to do with Chilean secret police, nothing to do with Sarah. My life was simply too heavy and it had struck that fragile, chaotic element called chance like a hammer smashing into a ball of mercury and sent it flying in all directions.

Dina Jensen led me to my offices. They were small, and looked smaller for the jumble of cartons and the overturned furniture, the ashen patches on the wall where the previous tenant had hung her citations and memorabilia. There was a small black sofa pushed up against one wall, a few reading chairs here and there, and two wooden desks, one resting on top of the other, face, to face. The desk with its legs in the air had its drawers secured with masking tape. Masking tape had also been used to wrap the exit door of the ornately carved cuckoo clock that hung on the wall. As we came in, the hour was just striking and I heard the imprisoned cuckoo pummeling against the shut door, its call muffled and distant.